May 3, 1998

Every tip has been a story no one can confirm and every lead a dead end.

The path to Auntie Rose Makuakane and Peter Boy Kema is lined with detours that go nowhere, details about events that never happened and people who may not exist.

For the past two weeks, as Peter Kema Sr. has defended his story about the day he gave custody of his 7-year-old son to her last summer, Big Island detectives have struggled to find the smallest shred of proof that there is an Auntie Rose.

So far, they have none. And a growing body of research suggests they never will.

Relatives, state birth and death certificates, court documents, bankruptcy files, voter rolls, genealogical information and a national data base with 3 billion records haven’t supported Kema’s account of what happened in Aala Park last August.

Peter Boy, a child abuse victim when he was 3 months old, has not been seen by relatives in more than a year. His mother, Jaylin Kema, reported him missing in January after social workers and police persuaded her to file a missing-person report. Neither parent is considered a suspect in any criminal investigation.

Peter Kema told police that he gave his son to a woman named Auntie Rose, an old family friend, because he was running out of money. Kema said he had traveled to Oahu from his Hilo home to look for work and wound up living in a tent in Aala Park.

Auntie Rose was the cousin of his hanai father — Moses Makuakane of Kona, Kema told police. She had helped the Kema family for two weeks in 1982 after Kema’s mother died.

He had not seen the woman again until he met her in Aala Park, where she regularly sold lauhala hats, Kema told police.

The only fact in Kema’s story confirmed by police is his relationship to Moses Makuakane, who died in 1988. In Makuakane’s obituary, Kema is listed as a hanai son.

Relatives deny story

Family members say the truth ends there.

“That story they have about after my mother passed away and this woman came to live with us — that’s impossible,” said Lee Ann Kobayashi, Kema’s sister.

Kobayashi, who is three years older than her 27-year-old brother, vividly remembers the weeks and months after her mother died. And she remembers Moses Makuakane, too. He was her mother’s boyfriend.

No Auntie Rose ever came to their Kona home, she said.

“We would have known,” Kobayashi said. “We were there. We don’t know who he is talking about.”

Moses Makuakane’s sister, Luciana Tripp of Kona, also insists there is no Rose Makuakane in the family. Kema told police that Auntie Rose stayed in Tripp’s home at one point. That never happened, Tripp told police when they called.

“I know for myself that no Rose Makuakane came into my house to stay or visit,” the 65-year-old Tripp said Thursday.

The Makuakane clan is a large family with relatives on several islands. Bob Makuakane, a Pahala resident and former Big Island councilman, helped organize a family reunion two years ago in Volcano. He estimates there are 1,000 relatives, from pastors to professors, heavy equipment operators to outlaws.

“We have Filipino Makua-kanes. We have Japanese Makuakanes. We have haole Makuakanes,” he said. “But no Rose Makuakane.”

No record found

In a record search, the Missing Child Center-Hawaii created a list of 244 family members, none of them a Rose Makuakane.

Some members of the family belong to the Mormon Church, which maintains 11 family history centers throughout the state. The centers contain genealogical information and one of the family group sheets lists a Rosabella Makuakane.

But she was born in October 1893.

Strong evidence against Kema’s story comes from the state Department of Health, which keeps birth and death records for the entire state. The Advertiser requested a search and nowhere in that mass of certificates is there any evidence that a Rose Makuakane was born or died in Hawaii in the past 100 years.

The name that comes closest is Moana Rosalani Makuakane, a 39-year-old mother of two girls.

She said when a detective called her recently, she told him she doesn’t know a Peter Kema or a Moses Makuakane. She said she is willing to do anything to help find the missing boy, but all she knows about the case is what she has gotten from the newspaper.

Stories like Peter Boy’s are unsettling, she said, and they have made her fear for her own children.

“I just don’t trust anybody with my kids,” she said.

Parents assert existence

If there is or was a Rose Makuakane, she does not vote, has not bought or sold land, has never declared bankruptcy and has never committed any serious crimes.

Circuit and federal district court records show no trace of her. Bankruptcy filings and Bureau of Conveyance records going back 20 years make no mention of her. And she is not a registered voter.

If there is a Rose Makuakane in the United States, she doesn’t surface in a national data base that contains billions of records of people, telephone numbers, previous addresses and various licenses.

Even so, Kema and his wife, Jaylin, maintain that Auntie Rose is real. When they spoke to reporters last week, they pleaded for Auntie Rose to bring their child home.

Kema, his face showing little trace of emotion, couldn’t explain why relatives doubt his story.

“I kind of feel bad about that,” he said. “But I gave police the description. That’s pretty much what she looks like.”

Jaylin’s attorney would not allow her to answer questions, but she wept as her husband spoke.

Grandparent hopes

When the case gained increased media attention after Advertiser coverage began two weeks ago, reports began to surface that a Rose exists, but there is no evidence to support them.

For instance, at the Institute for Human Services, a shelter for the homeless within easy walking distance of Aala Park, clients say they know an Auntie Rose. One client said she even saw her — a woman in her 50s or 60s — waiting at a bus stop two weeks ago in Wahiawa.

Another client, Barney Kane, said the Auntie Rose he knows is about 38 or 40. Kane said he was in the food line at the River of Life Mission in January when a friend introduced him to an “Auntie Rose.” Kane said the woman had a young boy with her who resembles the photos he has seen of Peter Kema Jr. and that she resembles a police sketch.

Kane, a 37-year-old out-of-work bartender living at the shelter, spoke briefly with the woman and not with the boy, whom he described as thin and quiet but otherwise healthy.

He said while he is certain that Peter Boy was the child he saw in the food line, he is still skeptical of Peter Kema Sr.’s story about Auntie Rose.

“He must know something,” Kane said. “Why would he drop the kid off with her and he don’t even know where she is, where she lives?”

James Acol, Peter Boy’s maternal grandfather, is not ready to believe that Auntie Rose is fictitious. To think about that is far too painful.

“Until someone shows us something different, I will think that he is alive and with Auntie Rose,” Acol said.

‘We are not going to stop’

Every missing-person investigation has its share of bogus tips and this one is no different. Big Island Police Capt. Morton Carter, who is in charge of the Criminal Investigation Division, said his detectives have found inconsistencies in the information they’ve received from the public.

“We are getting a lot of calls,” he said. “Most of them are hitting dead ends. They say one thing but they find out the person has a different last name and not even in the ballpark in terms of appearance.”

That has given Carter more concern than frustration. “There has been a large amount of publicity regarding this case, and I would think that with this, if someone did see the child, we probably would have gotten more definite calls,” he said.

Carter hopes someone will come forward with the key that unlocks this mystery.

“I guess we are just hopeful that something will come up along the way,” he said. “We are confident that good basic police work will point us in the right direction.”

He said his detectives will follow every tip, even those that don’t seem to make sense.

“Until we know what happened in this case, we are not going to stop,” he said. “We are not going to go away.”

Staff writers Jean Christensen, Hugh Clark, Ken Kobayashi, Karen Peterson and Lynda Arakawa contributed to this report.

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